Friday, December 23, 2016

The first day of Advent this year was November 27th
and it ends tomorrow, December 24th.This is not something you would know from looking at my son’s LEGO Star
Wars Advent calendar, which has twenty-five cardboard windows, behind which
reside various cellophane bags containing either Christmas-themed LEGO people
(mini-figs, for the uninitiated) or a handful of pieces that once assembled
resemble a snowman, or toy-sized replicas of spaceships, like Boba Fett’s ship,
Slave 1 and Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter.Really
it’s just an awesome Countdown to Christmas calendar.

My son is a LEGO freak.Put a handful in a bowl, pour milk over them, and he would eat them.Likewise, he L-O-V-E-S Star Wars, so every
morning he wakes up completely geeked to open up another window, which I,
bleary-eyed, supervise from the couch at 7:30 am, coffee in hand.

This is mostly a good thing. My wife and I are cradle Catholics, and we are
raising our children in the faith, albeit in the Dorothy Day-Thomas Merton-Berrigan
Brothers tradition, and so this morning ritual of assembling small LEGO
contraptions (LEGO in Danish means “I play well,” btw) is at the very least
inspiring in him a sense of building anticipation, a sense that we are readying
to celebrate something really big, something game-changing.

Advent calendars, like Advent wreaths, rosary beads, and
eating fish on Fridays during Lent are practices that fall under the broad
heading of popular piety, devotions that are not required of faithful Catholics
in any kind of dogmatic way.They are,
according to very insightful post on Godzdogz,
a blog run by students at Oxford studying to become Dominican monks (and that I
cite here just because the title of their blog is ridiculous) “. . . a bridge between the things
of God and the things of the world . . .”

The
online Catholic Encyclopedia, a much more buttoned-down, yet very handy and
thorough reference if you ever need to settle a bet on the origins of the
doctrine of transubstantiation or what happened at the Council of Trent, notes
that the “feelings of devotion” found in popular pieties are “derived from four principal sources”:

In
other words, they make us feel good, anyone can do them, they help create
community, and they tend to be rituals practiced by monks, priests, and other
religious, people for whom doing this kind of thing is easier because they
aren’t as encumbered by the quote/unquote vicissitudes of everyday life, and
therefore they inspire us to get up off our asses and make some kind of gesture
or sign that we actually believe in something.

I’ve
never thought of the essays I write as popular or particularly pious in any
way.I tend to regard them as too
Christian for some and not Christian enough for others.

And
yet this idea of popular piety appeals to me as a writer of what some scholars
have called “religious essays.”Religious essays don’t get much mention at the AWP—I should know because
I keep pitching panel ideas and the powers that be keep rejecting them—nor even
in explicitly religious publications, which tend to favor certainty over the
kind of doubt that essaying inspires, but I assure you, the religious essay is
a thing.It is given a surprisingly lengthy
entry in Tracy Chevalier’s 1000 page tome Encyclopedia
of the Essay, which begins:

In
some ways, the term “religious essay” is an oxymoron, since “religious” is
commonly used to suggest faithful devotion or orthodox certainty while as
Graham Good suggests in The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (1988), the
essay tends to explore “inconsistencies” rather than reinforce existing
systems.

The
entry cites writers like John Henry Newman, Emerson, Kierkegaard, Miguel de
Unamuno, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, Jacques
Maritain and Theilhard de Chardin, Elie Wiesel, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry, all of whom
coincidentally grace the bookshelves in our house, with a special place given
to Maritain and de Chardin.Both
Frenchmen inspired Flannery O’Connor, especially de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist
whose mystical theory of human evolution inspired the title of her story “Everything
That Rises Must Converge.”

The fact that the religious essay gets some love in this
enormous reference book is not any kind of validation of faith any more than an
entry on food essays is a validation of the importance of food, but this list
of writers is objectively impressive.They all, each in their own ways, bear witness to the hidden, messy
aspects of humanity.

But religious folks don’t have a corner on this market.Maritain, one of my personal heroes, was
adamant that there is no such thing as a Christian Writer. There are writers
who happen to be Christian, for sure, but seeing your writing as part of, or
proof of, your devotion to Jesus, will, he believed, lead to bad art.

Which
is why when I reflect on what makes the best so-called religious essays good I
must admit that it’s not because the writer has made an iron-clad case for
belief, or spectacularly shamed abortionists, but because they have helped
remind me that my problems, and the world’s—those things that keep us from
being our best selves—are not new, but ancient.They have always been with us and will always be, no matter how morally
or ethically enlightened we feel we have become.

If
I do have a bias, though, it is that great art creates a bridge between the
things of God and the things of the world.If you’re not comfortable with the phrase “things of God,” then insert
some word or phrase that for you describes those things that are transcendent,
mysterious, or metaphysical.

I’m
usually leery of saying such things in spaces that are not marked as explicitly
friendly to earnest discussions of religion, but I’m offering these words here
because I believe that we essayists are, by our nature, religious beings. The
root religio is generally
interpreted to mean “to bind together,” or “reconnect.” (This is the meaning
that St. Augustine, who most credit with the creation of the memoir, used in
his writings.) To my mind essayists are in the business of creating communities
around faith and doubt, connection and disconnection, by helping us to define
and refine our thinking and our selves.

Baldwin, Bell Hooks, Tim Wise, Roxane Gay, and Ta-Nehisi
Coates take on race; Sontag, Didion, Solnit, and Leslie Jamison chronicle the ethical
and moral conundrums of the places and times they inhabit; McLuhan, Postman,
Foster Wallace, and Ander Monson,take on media, technology, and how our
self-hood is challenged by all that we passively consume; and Woolf, Audre
Lorde, Hooks (again), Richard Rodriguez, and Gay (again) confront issues of
gender and sexuality.

These are by no means exhaustive lists—I know I’ve left some
important names out—but they are my own personal flash-anthologies, groupings
that have coalesced in my mind over the years that I have been essaying.They are all guiding lights, whom I learn
from, steal from, and emulate. But, frankly, none of them, even McLuhan and
Rodriguez (both Church-going Catholics), speak directly to my own particular religious
experience as a forty-year old, midwestern, white, straight, cis-gender,
Catholic pacifist.

This is why the so-called religious essayists noted above
are, to my mind, such an important part of the essayistic and literary
tradition. From age to age, they seek to define and refine what it means to be
human in a world that often appears dominated by a spirit of resignation and
indifference in the face of the evils of war, poverty, and bigotry, all in the
name of unfettered mercantilism.

Essayists who take seriously religious traditions, take as
their starting point a notion that humans are vessels of the divine and are
therefore called to lives of discipleship and witness to truths and principles
that will lead us out of such moral morass towards lives defined by love and selflessness
not hate and opportunism.

And essaying, whether you think of yourself as religious or
not, is a form of service, of discipleship, to an ancient and innately human compulsion
to seek the truth wherever it may be found.For many of us—and here by “us” I need to expand beyond essayists to all
manner of artists, to include our readers who labor in so many different ways
to earn a living and provide for themselves and their families, and do so while
shouldering the weight of grief, anxiety, self-doubt, and addiction—when we
come to the page, whether as writers or readers, we are searching for good
news, for truth, for beauty that will restore to us some courage and dignity
that will help us in turn to bring good news, truth, and beauty to others in
whatever way we are able.

I’m afraid I’ve crossed the sub-generic boundary from
religious essay into sermon, another fascinating and rich literary tradition,
but whose roots are not explicitly religious.According to the OED, the word
originates in the 13th century from the Old French root sermon, meaning simply to talk, or
discourse, pre-dating the word “essay” or the practice of assaying by nearly three-hundred years. This is a bad habit of
mine, but one that as I’ve gotten older have learned that I just have to
own.

Maggie Nelson, another essential essayist who I should have
mentioned earlier, devotes a few paragraphs in her 2011 The Art of Cruelty to an essay I wrote on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, reflecting on my concern that
we can’t be like Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle McLachlan), both “pervert and
detective.”Nelson disagrees, saying, in
essence, that we “more often than not” we are both, though, she writes “. . . well-intentioned
moralists like Griffith may wish that it weren’t so.”

I cringe a little now at how piously absolute my statement
is.But in my defense I wasn’t just
writing about Blue Velvet, I was
writing within the context of the second Iraq war and the Abu Ghraib prison
scandal with folks like military prison guard Charles Graner in mind, someone
who believed his job was to keep our country safe from terrorists by “roughing
up” suspected Al Qaeda operatives, a euphemistic phrase found in the Senate
Intelligence Report on CIA Torture translated into photos of Iraqi men (most of
whom were pretty criminals rounded up in police state sweeps), naked, stacked
in pyramids, being menaced by guard dogs, and mock executed.It was, as many of you will remember, a
moment when America’s moral fiber was being called into question.The word ‘soul’ was bandied about a lot.People were asking, What have we become?

I counted myself as a part of that “we.”In the Blue
Velvet essay and the several other that comprise my first book, I was
writing to try to understand my own fascination with violence, and how I might
be able to reason my way free of its allure. Nelson calls me on my failure to find a way
out by saying that there is no way out, you’re human, to which I would say I
assayed: I attempted, I tried.

In the end, I’m grateful to Nelson.She exposed, without even knowing it, a
dualistic note in my thinking, one of the most fundamental Christian heresies:
the idea that the universe is governed by two opposing forces good and evil,
and the evil must be rooted out at all costs, a doctrine that can be easily
perverted into an “us vs. them” proposition—either you’re with us or against
us—which makes for a jingoistic theology and foreign policy, as well as,
unwittingly, to the creation of propaganda instead of art.

But one thing that I think Nelson completely missed, or,
really, just couldn’t have known, is that my desire to separate the pervert
from the detective is not connected to Catholic shame and self-hatred, or a
demand that art have a neat moral calculus, as much as it is that I know my
nature and I must try to resist it. Make
of it what you will, this is a reflective and religious impulse, an examination
of conscience.When I teach essay
writing, I sometimes call this a “move,” making it sound that we’re doing when
we essay is all just rhetorical chess.Actually, for me, it’s more of a spiritual practice that has been
engrained in me no doubt from reciting the Confiteor at Mass (“I confess to
almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters…”), from preparing for
confession, and from reading the great religious nonfiction writers, many of
whom I have already listed above.

This is all to say that my absolute statement—you can’t be both—was not made in a dogmatic
spirit, but as a public declaration that I saw the danger of thinking that I
could be both; a fear that in being both I was somehow better, more
enlightened.

I wished that I had put it in those terms, but then again,
no, because then Nelson would not have been goaded into conversation with me,
or the me who wrote those words ten
years ago.

This is all to say that I believe the essay, and especially
the religious essay, is a means of putting ourselves and others to the
test.It is as the French Jesuit Henri
de Lubac said of the essays he and his compatriots wrote during the rise of
Nazism, a means of “spiritual resistance,” a means of holding oneself
personally accountable, of giving testimony to what we believe to be true, even
at the risk of ostracization or worse.

I feel a long way from my sons LEGO-building morning ritual,
and yet now revisiting the
list of why popular pieties stoke feelings of devotion in us, I’m more convinced
than ever that the essay is a form whose popularity and importance. Will never
wane.Essays invite us to dialogue; they
engage us in deep contemplation over what is true and what is illusion, and in
so doing put us in conversation with a long, long line of thinkers and writers
who though we may ultimately disagree with, often earn our respect because of
their willingness to ask difficult questions, to bear witness, to resist easy
answers.

There’s one more way that LEGOs factor in here that, in the
spirit of Advent, in the spirit of preparing for the arrival of something, I
need to share.While it is generally
agreed that the root of “religion,” religio,
means to connect, or bind together, there is another earlier, competing interpretation,
that scholars trace to Cicero, whose own essays span the first century before
Christ.Cicero favored re-(again)
+lego, which comes from the Latin legere, variously meaning to “read,” “consider,” or "choose",
to “select,” "go over again," or "consider carefully,” and, it
is sometimes even translated “I put together.”

It is
this sense of the word “religion” that I want to privilege on this day and in
this season of hope, the sense that we are all carefully considering and
putting together an understanding of what we are here for, what we are called
to do.As my favorite religious essayist
Thomas Merton wrote: “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at
the same time.”

*

Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. He lives in Northern Michigan, where he directs the creative-writing program at Interlochen Center for the Arts.

5 comments:

Love this essay. This: "If I do have a bias, though, it is that great art creates a bridge between the things of God and the things of the world. If you’re not comfortable with the phrase “things of God,” then insert some word or phrase that for you describes those things that are transcendent, mysterious, or metaphysical."

This is my favorite of the Advent essays. Honest, inspiring, grounded. "Essaying, whether you think of yourself as religious or not, is a form of service, of discipleship, to an ancient and innately human compulsion to seek the truth wherever it may be found."

David, I love this piece. As a pastor who served congregations and preached regularly, I am excited by the connections you make between essays and sermons. There are moments for me when the lines between essays and sermons blur. This blurring challenges my attempts to separate the two forms. I believe you are right about the religious nature of essaying and love the idea you present about essayists creating community through addressing race, gender, sex, and ethical dilemmas. Thanks so much for writing this piece and giving me a lot of food for thought. - Billy

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